


you will not be spared

by MorningStarMusings



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, M/M, Mostly Gen, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 19:17:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18104762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorningStarMusings/pseuds/MorningStarMusings
Summary: Quentin is, as predicted, at the Wall. More accurately, he's lying on top of it, one leg dangling off the far side, still deciding whether this will be the night he jumps. The air here smells more like dirt and stones than whiskey, but it leaves Eliot with the same heady sense of wrong, the same ugly desire to flee somewhere warm and small and maybe not comfortable, but safe. Out of sight, out of mind. Whose sight, whose mind? Who knows? But his shoes are already ruined. He hikes up the hill and settles on the Wall next to Quentin's feet.Neither of them look at each other.





	you will not be spared

**Author's Note:**

> > The light has changed;  
> middle C is tuned darker now.  
> And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. -  
> This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.  
> The light of autumn: [you will not be spared.](https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/08/16/october-louise-gluck/)  
> 
> 
>   
> A small emotion of a thing that grew with the night. Part response to [this post](http://crossroadscastiel.tumblr.com/post/183328123522), part therapy prescribed mid-day by my best friend, almost entirely wandering nonsense.
> 
> Feedback is the kindest thing you can offer.

“Where's your lover boy?”

He looks up at Margo through his bangs, bleary, and looks right back down again at the table, shaking the cocktail mixer until the ice sounds louder than the beats. She doesn't take the hint.

“Ron? Scooby? Thelma?” Margo's hair is tumbling out of her bun in artful curls, three hours into the party, and the sheen on her forehead could be sweat or highlighter. She's either having a great time, or she snuck away to the bathroom at some point to make it look like she is. Hard to tell. “Watson? Sam?”

He snorts. “That one's made up.”

"Really." Margo's immaculately smudged eyelashes blink at him. ”Wait - really?”

Eliot stares back at her with matching incredulity, although it's less about her and more about...whatever the last pill was he took. Or the laced hors d'euvre from Josh. Or the French 69 he downed right before. Which, _yes_ , but now the house needs more grapefruit. He snags the closest frosh and sends them out into the rain to the store to fetch, locking the door behind them with a satisfying click.

“I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you?” Margo is still raising her sharp eyebrows and talking behind him, and he presses his forehead against the door's old wood to help him focus. It isn't cool. In fact, it's hot, and wet, from the party and his sweat or someone else's, but the pressure of it is soothing. 

Margo pokes him between the shoulder blades, and he groans. “Lord of the Rings?”

“Dismal response time on a homoerotic classic. I'm cutting you off.” She does, in fact, taking the newly-filled wine glass from his hand and downing it in one go before snapping her fingers and sending the entire boozy setup to fuck knows where. He groans again. “Back to the point: Quentin. You’ve seen him?”

“No,” he lies. “Why?”

Margo doesn't huff, but the tightening of her lips and the stilling of her shoulders indicates if it were just the two of them, she would. “Because Alice is over in the corner chasing everyone away with murder eyes, which is so not the vibe I arranged for today, and because you've had eyes for him like a damn tracking spell since the day he got here.”

“Your point?”

“My _point_ is that - sweet Prince's _ass_.” The current DJ, stationed as she is on a platform at the side of the hall, has been steadily inching her equipment away from Alice's literal rain cloud for the past five minutes and is now making a hasty retreat with the whole setup as the rain turns to little droplets of glass. Someone enchants a worn out stuffed bear to replace her; Margo raises her voice with admirably little effort to match the sudden explosion of EDM. “My point is that I need to go find this party a better DJ. And _you_ could use some fresh air.”

“You want Quentin to DJ?” It's such a preposterous idea - Quentin with his hair pulled back and frowning at the sliders, Monsters and Men and Evanescence intermixed with tasteless nineties rap, eyes creased in adorable, if mistaken, concentration  - that Eliot giggles. His curls, startled briefly awake, flop away from his eyes with less grace than Margo's but exactly as much sweaty determination. “Hard pass.”

Margo's fond glare turns steely. “I wasn't asking.”

“I wasn't agreeing.”

“El,” she snaps. “Out.”

" _Fine_. So _bossy_.” He rolls his head back to clear his eyes so he can glare at her and doesn't bother grabbing an umbrella, just unlocks the door and shrugs his vest straight. Margo, exhausted but regal, watches him go with glittering eyes. As soon as his heels cross the threshold, he's locked out. 

The storm is unusual for New York, but not for Iowa. The heavy water suits his headache better than the house and for the first time since the fight this morning he lets himself relax into it. He's drenched within thirty seconds. It's the surest sign he's not an urban native, and a gesture he'll deny if anyone's still sober enough to see him from the cottage, but right now being soaked is a necessary allowance. He stands in the yard, face up to the shards of gray sky, until both the anger and the drugs dull and his thoughts stop sounding so much like fog. Then he starts walking. 

Visibility is long past poor. If it weren't for the occasional flashes of lightning at the edges of his vision, he'd decide he must be blind. But it doesn't matter - Margo was right. He could find Quentin blind, with his eyes shut, backwards, from a different world, blindfolded, from sense alone. He lets his feet take him through the mud on autopilot and is grateful for the annoyance. Any stronger feeling is a guaranteed fucking catastrophe, and that quota was full last Tuesday.

Quentin is, as predicted, at the Wall. More accurately, he's lying on top of it, one leg dangling off the far side, apparently still deciding whether this will be the night he jumps. The air here smells more like dirt and stones than whiskey, but it leaves Eliot with the same heady sense of wrong, the same ugly desire to flee somewhere warm and small and maybe not comfortable, but safe. Out of sight, out of mind. Whose sight, whose mind? Who knows? But his shoes are already ruined. He hikes up the hill and settles on the Wall next to Quentin's feet.

Neither of them look at each other.

Instead, Eliot looks out. Brakebills sprawls behind them like a map on fire; New York, always a season behind, touches the horizon the other direction. There, it's mid-summer. The heat coming off the millions of people pounding thousands of yards of pavement casts the city as a mirage - heady, overwhelming, the only good thing to ever make Eliot feel small. 

Quentin, on the other hand, is violent in his vastness. Eliot aches to look at him. But looking is all he can do - Q is too busy smoking to talk and the rain is stopping and Eliot has to fill the silence or he'll go back to drowning by himself, so he rips off the scab and pokes his pride where it hurts most.

“I'm sorry,” he starts, because why not. “I shouldn't have used your shampoo.”

Q doesn't move.

“And you weren't wrong about the TV schedule, and it's my fault Penny's tacky crime show got deleted. I'm sorry I used all your tea lemons for tequila shots when we ran out of limes.” 

Nothing. But that's fine, Eliot has been fucking up his whole life. He can keep going for as long as this takes. Or until Margo relents and lets them both back inside. Either way, it could be a while. 

“I'm sorry about the water bill last month, although I'm not sorry for turning the stairs into a Jacuzzi slide; but I am sorry for not warning you before I pushed you down them even though I think you ended up having fun. I'm sorry for thinking your Law and Ethics notes were the student handbook and using them to mop up when the toilet clogged. I'm sorry for lying about doing that and for blaming it on Todd.”

From the corner of his eye Eliot sees a bit of Q's mouth quirk. The blue smoke that escapes transforms itself into a ship and loops a languid voyage around Eliot's head before heading off to the fairer day of Manhattan.

It's metaphorical, and enough like forgiveness that he should stop now and enjoy their tentative peace, soak it up and keep it under his skin and let it make a home there. Unfortunately, because he's _him_ , he can't.

Maybe it's the drugs, or maybe it's inevitable - he and Q have so much in common. The way they dismiss sadness with sarcasm. The way they talk about their lives exclusively through vignettes of self-deprecation. The desperate, pathetic need to belong to something other than where they've been. It makes sense even to his foggy brain that they share this rambling sense of loss, too. The apologies tumble out of him darker and faster, and he squeezes his eyes shut against the weak afternoon sun and so he can't see Q watch him tear himself apart.

“I'm sorry for fucking it up with you and Alice. I'm so, I’m- I’m sorry. I'm sorry things are so goddamned fucked up right now. I'm sorry you're here for it, for me being such a fuck-up for, and for Mike, for- I-” 

He's fumbling at his chest pocket, chilly silk scraping against trembling callouses, coming up empty. His breathing should be muffled by the heaviness of the wet earth but it's not, it's jagged, ugly and too loud in his own ears. A stray ember nestled in Q's smoke drifts past his shoulder and stings his neck like a brand, and now his ears are ringing, his veins like ice, and-  Then he's got it, the soggy cigarette he lets everyone think is for show, and he shudders with relief. He snaps his fingers.

Nothing happens. 

Again - a jolt in his trembling fingertips, but.

No flame. 

 _Nothing happens._  He's somehow fucked up even this, even a year one spell. Oh god.

Words keep bubbling up his throat but he grits his teeth before they can escape so they choke him, instead, and suddenly he can't breathe. Tremors spread from his fingers until his whole body is shaking uselessly and he wants to run and he wants to let himself fall but he can't do either. His mouth is disconnected. His fingers belong to someone else. He is drifting, drifting, out of control, off to the side. The cigarette drops into the dirt. _He can’t breathe._

Pressure on his left thigh brings him back to himself.

Someone's leaning over him, anchoring him, holding a lit cigarette to his mouth. He sucks at it on instinct, and as the smoke fills his lungs he feels himself settle back into his skin. The coughing isn't graceful, but it's proof of…something. Not being dead yet, maybe. “Q?” he rasps.

“Yeah. I- Yeah.” Fingers dig further into his thigh and Eliot opens his eyes. There’s a smudge of ash on Q’s jaw and he wants to reach out and wipe it off and wipe off Q’s worry lines, too, but he doesn’t trust himself to stop there.

Instead, Eliot takes another drag.

Q is still looking at him, forehead creased. “El?”

Right. Words. He exhales, and the smoke curls soft around them both. “Yeah.”

“I’m-” Q starts, then huffs, then he lets go of Eliot’s leg and abruptly leans away. But before Eliot can miss the touch he’s back, hands shoved away in his pockets but huddling close despite it. Eliot wasn’t cold before. But now everywhere Q isn’t touching may as well be ice for all he notices it, completely numb next to the fiery sensation of Q’s shoulder against his, his wrist against Q’s, the startled synchronicity of their combined pulses coursing through him and electrocuting his heart with each painful thump.

He passes the cigarette back. Q takes it, not greedy but no hesitation either, and in the sunset Eliot watches shamelessly the way his lips hold it steady as he lingers on the inhale like he’s filling himself up, like he plans to become forest fog himself. When he exhales it’s almost on accident - smoke slips out through the corner of his mouth and hovers in the air so they both look smudged and a little hazy. That fits. Eliot feels a little hazy, too.

And lightheaded.

It’s probably fine.

Quentin is here. It’s good.

He shuts his eyes, and takes another drag of smoke.

**Author's Note:**

> Forget magic – these kids are all dying of black lung by fifty.
> 
> Come yell at me or cry with me or even say hello on my Tumblr @bee-a-ts
> 
> Check out more of my writing, both fan-ish and original, on @the-stick-scribblers


End file.
